Town Talk: Candidates joust to lead the B.C. Liberal Party

Although former premier Christy Clark is staying a country mile away from the B.C. Liberal Party leadership contest, son Hamish Marissen-Clark is assisting his dad Mark on MLA Michael Lee's campaign. Malcolm Parry / PNG

LIB AND LET LIB: B.C. Liberal Party leadership candidates jousted in the Bayshore hotel ballroom this week. As well as striking a second-ballot deal, veteran cabinet ministers Mike de Jong and Andrew Wilkinson pitched for steady hands on the derailed wheel. Former Surrey mayor Dianne Watts, who has yet to stand for election provincially, urged party members to pry such hands off the wheel. MLAs Michael Lee, Todd Stone and Sam Sullivan looked for advantage in their variously intermediate situations.

Absent from the shenanigans was former premier Christy Clark. But 16-year-old son Hamish Marissen-Clark accompanied father Mark Marissen, who has been chin deep in municipal, provincial and federal political campaigning since he was a special assistant to Liberal MP (and one-time B.C. Liberal leader) David Anderson in the 1990s. Stone remembers Marissen from his Young Liberal days, when his trenchant campaigning style sometimes had pantomime aspects. This time around, Marissen backs Michael Lee. He’s been right — and wrong — before.

BEST OF TASTE: Founders Nina Cassils and Vivian Thom fronted the 9th annual Taste The World wine tasting gala in the Four Seasons Hotel recently. TTW’s volunteer board staged the event. Attendees paid $75 each. Coleen Christie emceed, auctioneer Howard Blank raised $113,800, and a total of $211,800 will make its way (there are no deductions) to Medical Action Myanmar and the Lao Friends Hospital for Children. That money will treat 40,000 children, test 8,000 children and adults for TB, buy 8,000 blankets, 3,000 mosquito nets, 800 rapid-test kits, eight motorbikes for care providers, and facilitate health care in remote villages. Not bad for a rainy night and a glass or two of wine.

Founder and artistic director Christopher Gaze likely never expected Bard on the Beach to be the Vancouver International wine festival beneficiary. Malcolm Parry /
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TWO GENTLEMAN OF VIOGNIER: Bard on the Beach artistic director Christopher Gaze staged William Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona in 2017. What will repeat this year is the theatre company benefiting from the ever-growing Vancouver International Wine Festival, which will run at the Vancouver Convention Centre Feb. 24 to March 4. Gaze and festival executive director Harry Hertscheg staged a pre-taste at Blue Water Café recently, with plenty of vintages from theme nations Portugal and Spain. Shakespeare featured Spain in only one play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and never featured Portugal. Maybe the Armada and other Spanish belligerence dissuaded him, although the British already fancied such Spanish wines as the 2,900 barrels of sherry Francis Drake stole from Cadiz in 1587. Then again, Shakespeare’s audiences were less refined than today’s. A contemporary complaint referred to them as “vagrant persons and maisterless men that hang about the Citie, theeves, horsestealers, whoremongers, cozeners, connycatching persones, practizers of treason, and other such lyke.” No gentlemen among them seemingly.

Featured in a new biography, city-based advertising biggie Frank Palmer would disconcert clients with a discreetly placed whoopee cushion.Malcolm Parry /
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WHO DID THAT? Robin Brunet’s biographical Let’s Get Frank recounts city-based Frank Palmer’s rise to the advertising industry pantheon. A negotiating strategy he may have employed was hinted at when reviewer Stuart Derdeyn mentioned “practical jokes” (Vancouver Sun, Jan. 20). Palmer’s pranks included a remote controlled whoopee cushion on which he could program anything from repetitive windy-pops to full bore raspers, much to the consternation of those perched beside it.

Seen with late bandleader Dal Richards, singer Juliette ‘Our Pet’ Cavazzi was the subject of a recent wake at Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.Malcolm Parry /
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RIP II: Friends and showbiz colleagues memorialized two female performers recently. Royal Vancouver Yacht Club hosted a wake for singer Juliette “Our Pet” Cavazzi, who had a decade-long Canadian TV show from 1956. Indy-movie types and others met in the less salubrious ANZA Club to remember Elena Esovolova who died in an auto accident Dec. 17 while visiting her Kootenays home. The “kick-ass actress” warranted that self-description in 2010 when, with a Monte Carlo hotel reservation fizzling, she strolled uninvited aboard a regal yacht and partied until train time next morning.

Actress Elena Esovolova, seen here with friend Maggie Coulombe, died in a Kootenays highway accident while visiting home for the holidays. Malcolm Parry /
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GREAT CHIEFTAIN: Should the clatter of hoof beats disturb your pre-dawn repose Monday, blame the previous evening’s revels. Sunday is when Scots and others will celebrate at Burns suppers. It is a tribute to Scotland that its principal folk hero, Robert Burns, is a poet who died at age 37 in 1796. In his memory Scots dine on haggis, a concoction of oatmeal and sheep’s offal traditionally (though now seldom) boiled in the donor animal’s stomach lining. Burns called haggis “great chieftain o’ the pudding race,” and supper officials slice it open with a dirk, thus “trenching your gushing entrails bright like onie ditch” Served with boiled turnips, haggis is washed down, sometime copiously, with whisky. This is where hoof beats come in. As a young Glasgow Herald reporter, former Vancouver Sun managing editor Michael McRanor returned from a Burns supper slung face down on a horse, whereupon his father asked: “Is he dead?” Sunday’s homeward bound might better choose taxi or transit, and face up.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Political office seekers vying for ascendancy echo a newspaper photo of a London street merchant whose pushcart bore the sign: “Don’t vote. It only encourages them.”

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